This may not make much sense to people outside University of Chicago, but every year we have a huge scavenger hunt, one of the biggest in the world, where we do things like make a keyboards that can perform logical operations, made a MONIAC cycles of natural systems, and has in the past included one team making a working nuclear reactor.

Me and one other person decided to form a team for this year, and we co-captained this team. We did way better than anyone expected, beating every team that wasn't an established house team that had over 100 people and lots of monetary resources, while our team had only 15 people.

I think there are two important points I got from the typical mind fallacy. The first is the usually one, that people have different preferences and different ways of thinking. The second is that people have different experiences, and I shouldn't use my experiences with a certain subject as a model for everyone's. Perhaps this could be called the typical experience fallacy?

For example, I grew up in a reform Jew, and my experience from that was "Unpleasant to be forced to say things I don't agree with, but tolerant of differences." It wasn't until I talked with others about their experiences that I realized it ranged to anything from "Everyone must believe strictly in everything, any disagreements are signs of evil" of Orthodox to "God probably doesn't exist and we should do our best to help others" of humanistic chapters.

It's at least plausible that Snape, as a potions expert who grew up with muggles, thought there might be some connection between potions and chemistry and learned the basics of chemistry.

I have no idea what Thiel is thinking of, but I'll volunteer to get a brainstorm started:

Male to female love is 70% physical attraction. Yes, love.

Edit: I guess this related to race and gender, but I don't want to hold back one of my edgiest beliefs.

Suppose you became deeply religious as a young adult and married someone of the same religion with a traditional promise to be loyal to them until death. Divorce was unthinkable to your spouse and you had repeatedly reassured them that you fully meant to keep your promise to never leave them, no matter what changes the future brought. You are now no longer religious and remaining married to this person makes you miserable in ways you are sure you can't fix without betraying who you currently are. Is it moral to leave your partner? Why and why not? (Don't worry, this is a hypothetical situation.)

I believe that what happens on stage is what's important in a story.

More generally, I think Harry should be doing more towards putting together a team. I hope that Eliezer more fully learns the lesson from how well HPMOR fans did with the final exam.

To be fair, HPMOR was a major achievement. Doing justice to fiction about a team of very smart people might be more than can be expected.

I didn't see this chapter so much as mockey of canon-Potter, merely bouncing off of it, noting it's different. Canon HP is not this HP, mainly reasons for which canon HP cannot be blamed.

He knows. The thought came to Harry, and he couldn't have said in words just what the Potions Master now knew; except that it was clear that Severus knew it.

The Dark Lord spoke the words "Hyakuju montauk" without pausing in his stride, accompanied by a jab of his wand; and Severus staggered before he lifelessly drew himself up beside the door once more.

"What -" Harry said, as he followed. "What did you -"

"Just fulfilling my obligation to my faithful servant. It shall not kill him, as I promised you." The Dark Lord laughed again.

I don't understand either of these. Though this in the mix and I still don't understand.

I went to the Dark Lord intending to sell him the prophecy in exchange for Lily's love becoming mine, by whatever darkness was required to achieve it.

Severus shook his head. "Too many students would remember me as the evil Potions Master. No, Minerva. I will go someplace new, and take a new name, and find someone new to love."

I get the character arc "Snape's obsession was used by Dumbledore and Voldemort, but he has finally gotten over Lily and can move on" -- it's just these specifics I don't understand.

I think the problem here is with many trivia questions you either know the answer or you don't; the dominant factor in my results so far is that I either have no answer in mind, assign 0 probability to my being right and am correctly calibrated there, and then all of my answers at other levels of certainty have turned out right so far so my calibration curve looks almost rectangular.

I might just be getting accurate information that I'm drastically underconfident, but I think this might be one of the worse types of questions to calibrate on. I mean, even if the problem is just that I'm drastically underconfident on trivia questions and shouldn't be assigning less than 50% probability to any of my answers when I have an answer, that sounds sufficiently unrepresentative of most areas where you need calibration, and how most people perform on other calibration tests, for this to be a pretty bad measure of calibration.

Perhaps it would be better as a multiple choice test, so one can have possible answers raised to attention that may or may not be right, and assign probabilities to those?

From chapter 38, when Harry buys the Quibbler:

"Gosh," Harry said half a minute later, "you get a seer smashed on six slugs of Scotch and she spills all sorts of secret stuff. I mean, who'd have thought that Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew were secretly the same person?"

EDIT: Then,

"And I'm secretly sixty-five years old."

Which is also true, because of Voldemort inside him. Which leaves....

"And I'm betrothed to Hermione Granger, and Bellatrix Black, and Luna Lovegood, and oh yes, Draco Malfoy too..."